The First Tale de Valois
by Loosh
Summary: Set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, this is the first chapter in the saga of Lucien de Valois: knight, lothario and, when there's fightin' needs doin', nowhere to be seen if he can help it! Feedback most welcome.


It was the old nightmare.

_S__teel and flame and coldest fear. Shouts, mad roars:_

_"Blood for the Blood God!" _

_Black-armoured men charging out of the blizzard, and things worse, things far worse. An inhuman maw, dripping gore: _

_"Skulls for the Skull Throne!"_

_My sword, iced over, stuck in its scabbard: the Norseman's axe coming down on my head. I cannot draw my sword... I cannot draw my sword! _

_I CANNOT DRAW MY SWORD!_

I awoke with a jolt, my arm sweeping the silver decanter and goblet from my bedside table. They crashed to the floor with an awful clang, the dregs of last night's wine flooding across the alabaster tiles. Blood on snow. Gods, I thought groggily, that's a bad omen if ever there was one.  
Fritz was through the door fast as a hare. "Lord Lucien! M'lord, is everything alright?!"  
"Everything's fine, Fritz," I said, cupping my aching head. "Just a silly dream. Be a good fellow, will you?"  
The footman set himself to cleaning the mess up. I turned away and put a hand to my chest. My heart was pounding, fit to burst. I was too old for this. Perhaps this was what carried relics like me off in the end. By Haendryk, it had been a long time since I'd had nightmares. I'd thought they were done with me.  
By the light shining through the stained glass image of Sigmar, I could tell it was just after sunrise. The patron god of the Empire stood, forever in the window, silently judging me. I couldn't help but sneer before I sat up, dizzy as a dervish and with a headache to boot. There was no way I was getting back to a decent sleep now, I decided, so when Fritz was done I told him to put the kettle to boil and to throw on the best bacon.

My name is Lucien de Valois. In the stories, they say my fame was won at a time when knights were noble warrior poets and the sword honour made steel, and how I was a paragon for all others, so virtuous and brave and so on and so forth and pass the flagon 'round. Well, I'm going to tell you a very different tale, one in which 'noble' and 'brave' are far from the best descriptors of my behaviour in those fateful years, and you may be sure the only poetry that ever interested me was the poetry of a pert rump. For you don't survive to the prodigious age of seventy-two by catering to the whims of psychotics or by marching to your doom to help fulfil the ambitions of upstarts. No, like some great Cathayan thinker recommended, I have managed to cling on for dearest life long enough to see the bodies of my enemies and rivals float down the river. But more of that anon.

By late morning, I'd pushed the old nightmare back into the deepest lockbox of my mind, and I was feeling as renewed and prepared as a septuagenarian can feel. Indeed, I thought it passing odd that now the day for my annual appearance at the Emperor's court had arrived again, my traditional compulsion to jump on the nearest horse and to flee to Tilia was absent entirely.  
And so it was with a veritable spring in my heel that I came to descend the steps of my keep, to the cheers of my servants and fieldfolk, all gathered to see me off. Everyone was there, it seemed, including, I noted, the miller's daughter. Dorothea. A rare beauty she'd flowered into, all blonde curls and pretty freckles. I had a quiet word with my quartermaster, a discreet fellow, about having her working in my household staff before I returned.  
Yes, Gretzelhopf is a merry little place with good vineyards and cheery people, but there's nothing like a few weeks in the capital, with all the far more exotic entertainments it draws to keep me entertained.  
Just after noon, the palace coach from Altdorf rolled into the cobblestoned courtyard, pulled by four magnificent Reikland coursers twice the size of the local nags. I condescended to give my people a wave before I jumped in and sped off, bouncing away the journey with a good blanc and two courtesans someone had thoughtfully provided.

At the clogged Northern Gate the throng parted as if for the Emperor himself, and I entered the city to great blasts of trumpetry. Cramped Altdorf, soggy Altdorf, filthy, smelly, throat-cutty Altdorf, Aldorf of the half-timbered houses and steeply sloping roofs.  
While the giggling harlots and I hastily put our clothes back on, the coach rolled through the streets, now joined by mounted Imperial Heralds who roared at the tops of their voices that the great paladin hero Lucien de Valois is returned once more to instruct the Empire's knights in the ways of chivalry and honour and all the rest of it. Then for two days and nights they put on plays, operas, re-enactments (hah!) and even puppet shows featuring cloth dolls of me on horseback riding down dragons. On the street corners, enterprising folk told the Ten Tales de Valois without charge, while their cutpurse compatriots worked the crowds. And throughout the metropolis, those small few who were heretofore ignorant quickly learned what a splendid fellow I am, for wasn't it I who took it upon myself to endure the world's greatest tests so that ordinary mortals like them shouldn't have to? Oh, how they must see me as I studiously shamble up the steps every year to receive some trinket or other from the city fathers. A silver-bearded ancient, faltering under the weight of his scarlet armour. I wonder if they truly quite believe it all. It's fanciful stuff, yes, and probably a quarter true. But if they were ever to discover the complete truth, unvarnished by the needs of politics and my own wholesale lying: if they learned how I failed every godsdamned test that was ever thrust my unwilling way, or at least cheated, lied or backstabbed my way through them... Well, it's fortunate that the dead haven't managed to inform on me yet.  
After a seemingly interminable parade and some more demented speechifying by the Emperor's wormlings, it was once more into the coach and on to the cleanliness and beauty of the palace, where as usual I made a good show of creaking in and straining to hear the prattling of sycophants and the phenomenal stupidity of the great high wormling himself. A different man than old Karl-Franz, this one. They say absolute power corrupts absolutely; well, it can also turn you into an absolute bore, and K-F had never been that. But more wine proved distracting enough, and I found comfort in knowing that everyone who's anyone agrees I am too old to be tasked with anything more perilous than admiring artless brats play-acting with wooden swords.  
Yes, it's a grand life for an old lech like me to have his own pocket of land and to safely attend court and be treated like the Emperor's favourite uncle. And yet, on this particular occasion, it all seemed so blasted fleeting somehow. Spending my two week visit in the quiet of the palace gardens by day and my nights in pissing away the Emperor's coin in all the clubs and taverns and gambling houses I could stomach, with as many wenches as I could carry on two arms, I found that something didn't sit quite right with me. The best beers of Altdorf didn't cheer me like they used to, and the most experienced pillow women could raise nothing from me but a weak smile.  
The old passions were simply gone. It was mighty unsettling, I can tell you.  
I slowly realised that for the first time in my long twilight, I had begun to ask myself if I'd see another year. Would next year's gardens be those of Morr, god of death? Would my demise really not be at the evil end of some bastard's sword, but because a silly little thing like a nightmare proved too much for my old carcass?  
Awful thoughts to have with your hands around a pair of award winning tits, eh?  
But of course that's how my death would be, how I had prayed it would be for most of my life. An old man warm in his bed at home, the briefest moment of pain, and then out like a light. That's the soldier's prayer. Yet I wasn't ready, even now, not quite.  
I cursed that damned nightmare again but decided then and there, as I watched the son of some nobleman have his legs swept from under him (right down on his arse, hard, the little swordsman!), that if I were ever going to commit my story, my true story, to paper, it had better be now, before it was too late. I'd never see it published, of course, and if you're reading this within a hundred years of my death, someone has broken a sacred oath. Truths as blunt as I plan to tell would shake too many pillars. Yet I thought of Sigmar, his stained-glass form looking down at me in judgement all these years. And I thought of all the guff that commoners and high born alike are fed about heroes and sacrifice and loyalty to emperors and kings unto death.  
I wanted to produce a tome that would send a shiver right through the halls of power for centuries to come (once I was safely deceased, naturally). A genuine account, for once, of how the business of saving the realms of men does not always fall to visionary leaders, incorruptible knights and majestic wizards, but also, more often than you'd think, to cowards, cheats and folk whose only interest is in saving their own miserable skins, and Khorne take the hindmost.  
Yes, that would do the trick. Putting a pin to the gassy balloon of it all. That would give me a great deal of satisfaction, indeed.

* * * *

I suppose you could say it all started with an itch. Not in the Empire, but in the greatest, richest city of them all: the free port city of Marienburg in the Wasteland. My home.

"Will you ever stop fidgetin' with it?" Alina complained. "You've been at it all night, and it's only gonna make it worse!"  
"I don't pay you for medical advice," I snapped, but it was true. It had been hours. Yet no matter how hard I rubbed and scratched, the itch in my foot just would not abate.  
I sat up to take a closer look. My heel was bleeding now, and it looked so raw and puffy that I doubted very much if I could walk on it.  
Alina started to put her blouse back on. "Oh, sod this. I want you out o' here, young Master de Valois. An' you'll be payin' me for them sheets," she added spitefully, "Araby cotton, they is, an' your rotten bloody foot all over 'em!"  
This was too much. "Oh, shut up about your blasted sheets," I spat, "and fetch me a basin of water, will you?"  
She tutted but quickly brought the water and towels, and I set to washing. What had I picked up in this wretched slum? There I was, seventeen, heir to a wildly successful silk trading company, and stricken with some Suiddock pox that would no doubt render me impotent or kill me flat. One read about such things in the gazettes all the time. Oh, but it was maddening. Had I stood on something? A nail perhaps? Surely I would have noticed. I wasn't that drunk.  
I did what I could but soon had to admit there was nothing for it. I had only made it worse. Not only was it bleeding fit for a slaughterhouse, but my clawing had split the skin and a large flap had come loose.  
"Well, that's just disgustin', that is," Alina volunteered cheerily, taking to a chair and starting up her awful pipe. "It looks like somethin' that'd come off a snake."  
The stink of dwarven tobacco quickly choked the room.  
Remembering her there, puffing away by the window with the sickly green glow of the moon Morrslieb on her face and bare shoulders, I'm not fully sure what I saw in her. She would have been all of thirty, with crooked teeth and greasy hair that only sometimes passed for blonde. But she was the first real woman I'd ever had, you see, and in my own juvenile way I was quite taken with her. It was her eyes. She had the loveliest brown eyes, when she wasn't scowling. I'd spent forty guilders on her in the two months I'd known her, young fool that I was. My manservant Sven had found her for me, and twice weekly he would escort me to her chambers. Oh, there must have been three hundred women like her along the Suiddock docks who'd have happily provided her services for half her price. But she did have those eyes.  
"Why do you smoke that ghastly stuff?" I huffed, picking at my foot anew.  
"Used entertain a dwarf once," she said, with the awful smog shooting from her nostrils. "Out of Karak Varr, 'e were." She looked out the window down at the quay. "A true gen'leman. 'E wouldn't go at his dirty feet in fron' o' me, I can tell you that for nothin'."  
"A dwarf? And a gentledwarf no less?" I laughed. "By Haendryk, you Suiddock folk never fail to amaze!"  
"Haendryk? 'E's that fancy god what you menchantfolk pray to, yeah?"  
I ignored her wittering, finally succeeding in peeling the flap of skin off entirely. "Ah," I sighed, queerly relieved, "now that's better."  
Then a funny thing happened, and my life changed forever.  
Alina began to scream. I stared at her with a stupid grin on my face, lost. "What in the-" was all I managed to say before she'd dropped her pipe and was bolting from the room.  
It was extraordinary, and frightening. There was a hand mirror on the locker by the bed. I lunged for it and held it out before my poor heel. "Really, Alina," I shouted after her, "you're being rather squeamish, considering what... you... do... for... a..."  
My heart went crossways, and the living sweat came pouring out of me. For on the ball of my foot, just as if some madman had tattooed it there, was a symbol every quarter-sane elf, dwarf, halfling and man fears and reviles.  
_It was the eight-pointed sigil of the Dark Gods._


End file.
